helpful cooking site
 

Wow, I'm a huge tool bc I am thrilled I found this page. Had to share.

http://food.oregonstate.edu/faq/faq.html

It has a lot of answers to those "Why does" questions we have about foods and ingredients.

More so than a copy of Joy of Cooking?

I associate reading the Joy of Cooking with being a middle-aged, overly domestic housewife. Which I am not.

The Internet, however, is a different case.

Somebody needs to pitch the Joy of Cooking folks a seachable web site.

The new joy of cooking is an abomination. The old venerable J O'C was a wealth of information on the underlying principles of cooking.

I was given a copy of the new one and I flipped it open to double check instructions for something simple like a roux or making stock, I forget which and I find instead of explanations there is some LAME ASS SHIT like "today's world is so busy no one has time to cook, so it is much easier to open a package of..." I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea. The book sucks like a pail of leeches.

It's like the pillsbury bake offs. No one bakes anymore, they open a variety of boxes...

We got a Joy of Cooking and a Betty Crocker's Cookbook as wedding presents. This was in 1990, so I don't know what edition of JoC it was. Now I realize that JoC is supposed to be the culinary equivalent of the Bible, Talmud, Koran, Baghavad Gita, Upanishads, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Our Bodies Ourselves all rolled into one. But the fact is, I've never made anything out of it that came out halfway decent. And while I'm not a master chef I've cooked a lot and I can follow a recipe.

Betty Crocker, on the other hand, has yielded many fabulous successes. I'm ready to buy another one because it's literally falling apart.

Not so! Not only do I bake from scratch, I like to experiment with recipes from the 30's, 40's and 50's. Yesterday, I baked a Tomato Soup cake (depression hold-over my aunties used to make) :) and made the cream cheese frosting, too.

I also highly recommend the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. We use that one all the time. We use the Joy of Cooking cookbook too, but much less often.

I think I have the Betty Crocker Cookbook and it has yielded some good stuff in general. In my opinion, the must have cookbook for anyone is The Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook - from the publishers of Southern Living magazine. Not only does it provide a lot of helpful how to information, the stuff I've made from it is really good too.

Recipezaar- the best recipe website!

This site has ratings by members on most recipes, so you can just look for all the ones that have 5 stars and they really are great recipes!
Too many times, I've made recipes from other websites that turned out like crap or gave poor directions. Now I stick to Recipezaar and Allrecipes,
Which also has ratings and very cool searching functions.

Sorry Bri, I was in a hurry when I typed that last part. I bake all the time too. What I should have typed was that from Pillsbury's perspective no one bakes anymore. I heard a program on the radio about how the bake off has changed beyond recognition.

The opening of boxes has as much to do with pillsbury's other, prebaked products as anything.

Despite me and you and 8 other people we know who also bake, I think a trip to the local mega mart grocery store and a stroll down the cookie/bread aisle will tell you who is baking in this country today.

Me, You, eight other people we know, and Nabisco et al.

:mg:

maybe someone who is at work, and I can't figure out how it happens, but is able to surf while at work can look up the story on the demise of the Pillsbury bake off.

If I can, I'll look around later.

I cook! I make all of my meaty goodness from scratch... like meatloaf (no seasoning packets for me) and fried chicken and porkchops.... you get the idea. I also bake cakes and muffins and the like from scratch, although in a pinch a box will do okay.

Ooooh Brianna - what's the tomato soup cake?

Now that we've re-built our house and I have a new kitchen, I am soooo into cooking (and my waistline is proof!).

The thing that drives me crazy is that my husband actually prefers boxed/ canned dinners to home made stuff. I'm serious - he loves the Betty Crocker boxed "add water & milk" mashed potatoes.

I swear I can hear my beautiful copper Kitchen-Aid mixer screaming at the horror of me "fluffing" the "potatoes" with a fork!